Harris lays down challenge for Millwall at Norwich

MILLWALL boss Neil Harris is demanding a first away win of the season from his players in their New Year’s Day clash against Norwich City at Carrow Road.

After Friday night’s 1-0 victory over QPR, Harris warned “we can’t stand still”, with a number of the Lions’ Championship rivals in positions to spend money to improve their squads.

Millwall’s last away win in a regular league game was their epic 4-3 defeat of Bristol Rovers last April.

“That’s a challenge I’ve just thrown down to my players,” Harris said. “That’s seven wins here, nine clean sheets this season and 30 points already. It’s as much as we all hoped for if not more.

“But we can’t stand still, teams are going to spend in January to try and improve. We’ve got to make sure we’re better and the first thing we’ve got to do is win an away game.

“We don’t feel under pressure to do it, not at all, because we’ve won seven home games. We’ve had some amazing away performances and should have more points than we’ve got.

“However, we need to get that away victory just to get that momentum. We’ll look to do that Monday at Norwich.”

Millwall will have almost a day’s more rest than the Canaries, who kick off at 3pm on Saturday against Burton.

Harris said: "You think going into tonight with a couple of injuries – Conor [McLaughlin] and Tom [Elliott] might have made it if the game had been [Saturday] – bringing it forward, was that an error by me?

“But then you get the three points and you think, no, because now you get two full days' rest going into Monday. So it’s swung in our favour.”

Despite the Lions moving up to 15th in the Championship table following Steve Morison’s first goal of the season, Harris wasn’t entirely satisfied with the performance.

He explained: “If I was being critical, and it’s hard after getting three points and after what we’ve achieved this season, that’s the worst we’ve played for a long time. We played 10 times better than that at Derby and got beaten 3-0.

“We’ve played some teams off the park here. The first touch that we had and the end product was nowhere near the level we’ve set so far. I said to the boys not to take that as a dig at them, but if we want to keep building we’ve got to be better.

“I can be critical because I set very high standards for my players and they have delivered so far.

“We didn’t quite have the quality in the final third but that’s something we can work on.”